Monday, September 19, 2011

Reassigned

Shortly after reporting back to Ft. Dix in August, I was informed by my company commander that I had been reassigned to another company operating in another province in Afghanistan. However, that was pretty much all the information I had been given. Rather than write a post about the many possibilities of what I would be doing in my new position, I figured I would just wait until I got here, then write a post about it.
To give you a little back brief, I was originally slotted to be the Civil Military Operations Center Chief in Kandahar, supporting the 2nd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division. This position and location had a certain set of responsibilities that I'd been preparing for prior to the mobilization. When I got here (here being Paktika Province), I was told that I would be the Battalion S9 (read Civil Affairs Officer) supporting the 2nd Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment, 172 Infantry Brigade. While this is not a completely different job, the duties and responsibilities are unique and have their own set of challenges. Rather than provide you with a bunch of information that could be an obvious OPSEC (operational security) violation and put the lives of my fellow service members in jeopardy, I'll keep my mouth (read fingers) shut.
I arrived in the province last week and got to my new "home" yesterday, so I'm currently getting spun up on operations in the area. The most relevant analogy for what I'm doing now is "drinking from a fire hose" because there's so much information being thrown at me that it's hard to consume it all. Kind of like drinking water from a fire hose...get it???
As always, it will take some time to get established and comfortable in my new locale, so any prayers of support and encouragement will be much appreciated. I have access to the internet on regular basis, so I should be able to communicate pretty easily while here. Hope everyone reading this is doing well and I look forward to hearing about your life back in the states. It will be a nice release from the wartime environment!
JC

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